I once lived in a ramshackle house up the hillside from Camp Rose, on the south side of Fitch Mountain. More than once, I remember hearing what sounded like a woman’s scream, a disturbing sound of distress coming out of the night for whatever the cause.
I later found out that mountain lions (also known as cougars, catamounts, panthers and pumas) make a sound like that… It’s sort of cool to think there’s a mountain lion in the neighborhood, until it isn’t—like when a house pet disappears and all that’s left is fur (as happened to a good friend of mine), or livestock gets slaughtered.
For the past decade Julie Barr has had an alpaca ranch in Lake County, but last month a mountain lion mother and her two cubs took up hunting practice on the herd. They came back multiple nights, killing far more animals than they could eat—a total of 17 out of the 42 alpacas in her herd, according to this Press Democrat report. Ask a cougar researcher, such as Quenton Martins of Glen Ellen and he’ll say it’s preventable: bring in all livestock at night, make sure the fence is solid and high, preferably with a roof over the structure, and masked by shade cloth so the big cats can’t see the prey. Barr’s livestock pen had a wood fence between 5 and 6 feet, no roof, with the wooly camelids clearly visible. To the mountain lions, it probably looked more like a buffet than protection.
The members of Healdsburg’s Noon Rotary got a lesson in “living with lions” (the original name for Martins’ mountain lion research project, now run in association with Audubon Canyon Ranch), when Ami Bluestone showed up to preview “The Path of Puma-36,” a short movie she made about tracking a collared lion on his search for a place to live in the North Bay. The cat was fitted with a radio collar by Martins as a cub, so researchers were able to track his wanderings for over a year as the cat traveled throughout North Bay counties trying to find a place he could claim as his own home range. The map of his 1,421 mile meander shows him ranging well into Lake County, throughout Marin and Sonoma, and yes, following the Russian River up to Healdsburg, and to Fitch Mountain.
Bluestone’s film, at 16 minutes, will be one of the longer movies screened during the Healdsburg International Short Film Festival. The festival, with the enviable URL healdsburgfilm.com, runs Sept. 26-28 at the Raven Theater. We’ll have more to say about the HISFF in the coming issues—and if you hear strange sounds in the night, take comfort in knowing it’s just the wildlife.
